A fierce snow blizzard reached rural Helsinki sometime during the night, last week, when Wednesday turned to Thursday, January to February. The wind was howling when I opened my eyes around 6:30 am. The front door didn’t budge more than a mere 20 centimeters. The porch was thick with new snow. Heaps of snow covered our drive-way and yard. Heavy wind lifted the light snow powder up into the air changing the form of snow heaps. The downpour of snow was so dense that I could hardly make out the nearest trees behind a veil of snow. “We’re snowed in!”, I called to my husband.

The snow veil became more and more thick during breakfast. Well, nature shouldn’t overdo it, was my next thought. My agenda for Thursday, the first of February, was to commute to my workplace “bright and early”. I had many to-dos in my mental check- list. Everyday life reality kicked in fast: “Damn, this ruins my plans for today!” I must confess it took me a cup of tea, oatmeal porridge and some traditional newspaper reading, before I realized: No sense in being stubborn and ignoring the forces of nature. Nature gave me the cool opportunity to take time to think snowed in. And recover adequately from an intensive work day.

The day before the snow blizzard landed to Helsinki had been a day with many activities. From morning till early afternoon, I had the opportunity to discuss face-to-face, in the same time and space, with many people about working life, human health and well-being issues. The morning seminar held at Helsinki Music Centre on working hours and how should they be defined in today’s working life provided fuel for the later discussions that day.

After a brisk walk from the Music Centre in crispy winter weather, frost nipping my cheeks, combined with some bus time, I reached home. This was around the so called blue moment when day turns to evening. At home it was time to start the next phase of my work day. The urgent, must do -task I still had on my plate was to write and upload into the project portal the interim report on a research project I am leading. The deadline for this task was that same day. I had received updates from my collaborators a couple of days earlier. However, writing a readable summary of great research results is not done with a snap of one’s fingers. It often requires hard thinking and deciding what is especially relevant for those handling and evaluating the achievements. A reader can digest just so much.

Translating scientific reasoning and academic jargon into words and sentences that are understandable also to those who are not researchers or into neuroscience and clinical research takes time. In my opinion it is the responsibility of the researcher to make sure that through this translation into more general wording, the research results and their meaning do not change. It is so easy to cut corners and be vague, if one is not vigilant. Writing a readable summary is not about copy paste –stitching together pieces of text from my collaborators reports.

In addition to the actual research achievements -summary, there was the more formal report of doings and the use of resources that also had to be written into specific boxes of a digital document with a fixed format. While logging into the portal, I noticed that the system was slow to open. As I started to get a bit anxious with the deadline looming a few hours ahead, getting text written and saved into the appropriate boxes seemed to take ages!

To sum it up, I ended up doing intensive work that Wednesday evening. Afterwards I was in quite high-gear mode. On the other hand, the first results of our research, the fruits of all the hard work done by many people, inspired, as did the day’s many discussions earlier.

So, at the end of the day I hadn’t had any time to actually stop and think, to process all the new information and knowledge I had gained on the last day of January. What would be the best next steps? What learnings are especially important? The next thought that popped into my mind when the inspiring day was coming to an end was: “My to-do list has several other, mostly unrelated, things that need attending first thing tomorrow. How will I get back to the mode in which to use today’s information to create new knowledge or develop my own thinking?”

I didn’t sleep well. Too many thoughts were tickling my mind. Also, positive stress that enabled me to get into a flow mode during reporting was now keeping me too vigilant. The approaching deadline had induced a positive stress state that enabled me to get into a flow mode during reporting and to meet the deadline. Downshifting from this energy burst takes its own time. I should have started to relax earlier.

The seminar I had attended on the last day of January was on working hours. It was arranged by Finnish Economists and the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health. Results of recently completed research on working hours of experts were presented. The red thread of the event was how should working hours be defined in a 24/7 world where a fast-increasing number of people face, often daily, the challenge that, in their human networks, somebody somewhere is always awake. At the same time innovation, creativity, renewal, learning not to do things in a certain way and at the same time figuring out how to do things differently, are skills to be honed. The research showed that nearly 80 % of experts either need to be or at least feel they need to be reachable also after official working hours – in the evening, early morning hours, during weekends and often also during well-earned vacation time. Excessive work load was also common (over 70 % had experienced this).

In the seminar many attendees felt that the traditionally defined daily or weekly working hours that one needs to do in order to earn one’s paycheck is becoming – or some claim has already become – an obstacle for doing work in a more productive way. Strictly defined working hours that represent work in the industrial age work, just don’t work. The reality in many professions is that work and so called free time are more and more intertwined. In some sense the work of many people has become timeless and not bound to a specific place. Above I describe my work day. I have the luxury (I know I am fortunate) of flexibility at work. This time nature helped me to realize this.

In many types of work, video-calls, in which people are attending the call physically in different time-zones and with their differently ticking internal circadian clocks, are an important part of the job. Some jobs require zig-zagging around the globe. When is one at work and when is one on leave? Is it possible to adapt and figure out a way to stay in tune in these working modes? And on top of this come the demands and needs of family and social life that differ between individuals. Also, what suits one, doesn’t suit another person. Some people are at their best in the morning, some in the evening. Some people get the needed push to get things done from deadlines, others want to be ready well ahead of a deadline. How to take into account these differences in working hour guidelines? Is this an unsolvable catch-22situation? What would work for most people in expert type of jobs?

Are flexible working hours the solution? Do they always support good health and well-being? I claim not, if people themselves don’t take the time to stop and take a good look at their own working habits. Work and safety guidelines on how many hours of work a person can humanly do before reaching the breaking point that can have serious mental and health consequences are useless, if people willingly continually work from dawn till the wee hours of the night. Legislation doesn’t solve the issue, if people don’t take responsibility of their own well-being and keep a caring eye also on loved ones and work buddies.

I must confess that as a doctor, I have difficulties keeping cool, when I again and again hear or read comments like: “if you love your work, you do not count the hours you do the things you love”. My response is: “If you love your work, you take care of yourself and make sure that you are at your best, physically, mentally, emotionally and cognitively”. Overworking is addictive and in the end the price for this can be high: One loses sight of what is relevant in work and spends time with trivialities. Loosing health through overworking can be permanent.

To get things done and taking care of oneself at the same time requires inventiveness. How to plan my daily activities to ensure a healthy balance of doing, idling and wresting? What is the best solution for my unique life? Each one of us has to answer this for ourselves keeping in mind that there are also other people to consider. How does our team work best? What about life outside work? If one is constantly overtired, coming up with new ways of looking at one’s work and working hours can be tough. The weary mind isn’t inventive.

Legislation on working hours can protect to some extent, but it should not hinder putting into practice and testing new approaches to defining working hours. If somebody comes up with solutions to a conundrum. Many ideas look cool on paper, but trying them in practice is needed. Through doing new solutions can also arise.

So, having talked some sense to myself during breakfast last week, on the snow blizzard day, I embraced being snowed in. I accepted nature’s gift thankfully, reorganized my day and changed its goals. I spent the day recovering from an intensive work day. I let my mind wonder and weave new thoughts from past day’s experiences and put emerging ideas into writing. Every now and then I took a small break and shifted my attention from the computer screen to the outside world. My attention was captured by the swirling and energetic movement of snowflakes dancing to the tunes of the winds. In late afternoon, I grabbed the snow pusher and a shovel and spent a couple of hours in snow work. I had a very good night’s sleep. The next day my body’s muscles reminded me that snow work is nature’s way of providing an opportunity to get physical exercise along with fresh air.

Get a grip! I can handle this. That child is a handful. Did you grasp my meaning? Let’s keep our fingers crossed that everything goes well. This is a hands-on job. This comes handy. I am groping in the dark here.

Language tells us how important the hand is for us humans in many ways. We craft, build, dig, pat, tap, pluck, clap, wave, vow, sign, clasp, clean, eat, feel with our hands. Combining together bio-mechanics and morphological analysis with archaeological and paleontological research – especially of fossils – gives evidence that already in the far-off dawn of human evolution, our distant cousins, Pre-Homo hominins, were tool-users (Kivell 2015)

After joining Nokia Tech, one of the first things I noticed was the white boards and marker pens. As a welcome present I was given a The Dream Catcher –notebook. Rare are the meetings where somebody doesn’t jump up and go to the white board and either draw or write something. Sketching is the thing at Nokia for stretching the mind and why not also the legs and back. Moving around in front of the white board helps many of us to think. When words fail, I and many others draw.

A baby is really fascinated with his/her own hands. Babies spend hours just looking at their hands. Very soon a baby learns how to grasp and to point. Humans are also called pointers. It is claimed that only humans point at things to direct the attention of another person to something. I just heard from a neurologist colleague that the ability of a brain stroke patient to lift the index finger in order to point is one of the best predictors of speed and extent of recovery.

We also like to touch and feel objects. A pat on the shoulder can say more than words. We also have universal hand signs like thumbs up or down, victory with index and middle finger. Showing the middle finger can stir up volatile emotions. Forming a heart with both hands’ thumbs and index fingers is also well understood around the world. The social media is full of hand-related “stickers”.

Tapping one’s fingers can signal boredom, nervousness, eagerness to be on the go. Or one is immersed deep in thought and doesn’t even notice that the finger tips are skipping. When music plays in one’s head some of us just have to let it flow through the fingers – tap tap musicality. Other people can often interpret from the nuances of finger tapping the mood of the tapper.

Many enjoy using their hands. Finger painting, drawing in the sand, making snow balls, waves in the water. I once met a young man at the cashier in a supermarket who did cool finger-tricks with credit cards. I watched with awe how the plastic card moved between his fingers. With a flick of his fingers the card did a somersault and then landed on the palm of same hand. Then he switched hands! I asked him, if he was training for some competition. “No”, he answered, “This is just my way to use the pauses in this work to develop my hand skills”.

During the last year I have spotted people knitting and crocheting in trams, trains, buses, at lectures and even meetings. Swiping and tapping a mobile device is just too boring for our hands and I claim – for our minds and creativity. Research shows that use of hands is important for abstract thinking, problem solving, planning, making sense out of things, cooperation. Thus in terms of human evolution, we are still very much tool users, crafters. We have handling minds that need hands to grasp both literally and metaphorically. Our hand is a tool always with us.

The versatile interplay of arm, as well as the small hand muscles give the human hand its multifaceted and beautifully nuanced functionality. Several different sensory nerves (ranging from fast mini neural routes to multi-lane neural highways) start from the finger tips and run all the way to the sensory cortex of the brain. Their counterpart, motor nerves, start from the motor cortex of the brain and run all the way to the finger tips. These nerves drive hand motor function. The fine tuning and coordination of movement are directed and lead by several other brain area networks and neural circuits located in the frontal lobes, the brain stem (situated deep in the mid-brain), as well as the cerebellum (“little brain”).

Hands on health – shaking hands

A doctor can figure out several things from hands. In this blog I will focus on a few selected examples of medical detective work. First: the hand shake. Is the skin of a person’s palm rough, thick and calloused or smooth? This might give some hints on a person’s profession or hobbies. Is the skin sweaty or dry? If sweaty, the patient might be anxious or have elevated thyroid hormone in the blood. If dry, there might be a lack of thyroxine or the patient might be a too eager washer of hands and have some neurosis related to dirt and being clean. Or the person has sensitive, easily irritable, atopic skin that reacts to dry air, different types of allergens in food or the environment.

A knowledgeable doctor asks after shaking hands with the person seeking consultation: Do you feel like you have an invisible pair of gloves on your hands?” If the answer is yes, sensation of the hands is decreased and the diagnosis of polyneuropathy can be made at the spot. The underlying cause needs further investigation: Is it perhaps diabetes, vitamin B deficiency, excessive use of alcohol, what about drugs?

Grip strength and the way a person grasps your hand give information on muscle strength and hand-arm co-ordination. We doctors want to do right and left-hand handshakes at the same time in order to examine symmetry of function. If weakness is found on one side, a doctor’s mind kicks into further detective mode: Is weakness perhaps due to a damage to the peripheral median nerve in the carpal tunnel located on the palm side of the wrist? This tunnel is surrounded by several arm-muscle tendons. Over-strained stiff muscles cause inflammation and swelling in the tendons – tendinitis. This results in narrowing of the carpal tunnel and the median nerve is in a pinch.

If tapping the palm side of the wrist causes pins and needles –type of pain in the area and/or tingling of 2-4 fingers, the doctor asks: “Do you spend your day using a (computer) mouse? Do you ride a bike to work with a tight grip on the bike handlebars?” So, my readers if you experience these symptoms, you might have a mouse or biker’s hand. And let’s all pay attention to use of our hands. Monotonous hand gripping is often unconscious.

Tremor of the shaking hand(s) can be caused by nervousness, excessive use of alcohol or drugs, too much thyroid hormone in the body, lack of food and sleep – or a problem in the cerebellum (“small brain”). Or the clinical finding can be due to harmless essential tremor that often runs in the patient’s family. Medical detective work continues with further questions to the patient like: “Do you have family members who with age developed trembling hands or a ‘no no’ type of movement of the head?”

The involuntary shaking of the resting hand with thumb tremor brings into mind Parkinson’s disease. Now medical detective work continues with asking the patient: “Could you, please, write your name on this paper”. A typical sign of Parkinsonism is micrographia in which the handwriting is abnormally small. As some people have naturally small penmanship, it is important to compare the writing to something the patient has written earlier. In Parkinson’s disease handwriting becomes progressively and often imperceptibly smaller

After handshakes a doctor asks the patient to do some finger tapping, pointing, clapping, flexing, copying signs with fingers. These hand tasks give a lot of information on the relationships between human cognition, the social brain and the handling mind and health. More complex motor functions of the hands can be quite demanding cognitively.

Feeling the pulse with a finger while examining the patient’s wrist for carpal tunnel syndrome tells the doctor some more: If the pulse is high or the beat erratic and bumpy, thyroid hormone might be the culprit. A fast pulse can also be caused by white coat fright. Just being with a doctor makes some people nervous with shaky hands.

By the way: Why are some people right-handed and some left? Does hand dominance mean that the brains are differently wired? Well, that’s a topic for another Health Bytes blog. Stay tuned. Its sure to come as, being myself a lefty, this is one of my favorite topics.

In the middle of his wedding speech to his daughter and son-in-law, a middle-aged man experienced chest pain and difficulty to breathe. A heart attack, was the first thought of the people at the wedding. The man was rushed to the nearest ER. Some minor changes in the electrocardiogram (ECG) were seen and a small elevation in blood tests indicating some type of heart muscle damage. Unexpectedly angiography, an x-ray in which a contrast media is injected into the coronary arteries in order to visualize them and evaluate their condition, showed all of the coronaries to be open. So a cardiac stroke was not the cause of the man’s symptoms. However, the tip of the left heart ventricle was paralyzed and the muscle nearer to the base of the ventricle was hyperactive causing ballooning of the tip of the heart ventricle. It seemed like the area at the base was desperately trying to get the left ventricle of the heart to pump oxygenated blood into the circulation.

The malfunctioning heart was like a totally through soaked limp wet sock. Have you have ever gotten your socked feet totally wet? If so, you probably also remember that being out of a spare pair of socks you had to use quite a lot of grip force to squeeze and wring the socks to get all the water out of them before pulling them on your feet again. With this experience in mind you get quite a good idea about what is happening with the heart in a medical condition called Takotsubo (stress) cardiomyopathy. The heart is a heavy limp lump soaked with fluid. In an X-ray the shape of the heart is similar to that of a round-bottomed, narrow-necked vessel – tako-tsubo – Japanese fishermen use to trap octopuses. Hence the name Takotsubo. The cardiac disorder is also known as the “apical ballooning syndrome”.

This acutely starting dysfunction of the heart mimicking an ischemic heart attack was first described in Japan in 1990. First it was considered to be a rare condition triggered by a strong emotional state the patient experienced just prior to the attack. The middle-aged man above told the doctors that he had been anxiously waiting all through the wedding dinner for the time point at which he would give his speech. He wasn’t into speaking publicly. So the situation was even somewhat frightening for him. And to top it all he was also extremely happy that the newly-weds had finally tied the knot and at the same time worried that he soon stammers and mixes words; forgets what he had planned to say. All through dinner his mind had been full of questions like: will people think the speech boring, will anybody laugh at the preplanned jokes, will his daughter and wife like the speech? So this poor man was in the clutches of a turmoil of positive and negative emotions. His heart couldn’t take it. Today Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is also know as the broken-heart syndrome.

In medicine case reports are published on clinical rarities. This is how it all started with the Takotsubo syndrome. Case reports in medical research articles also alert clinical doctors to new possible causes underlying their patients’ symptoms. Since the early 1990’s medical data has steadily accumulated on Takotsubo. We now know that this acute stress cardiomyopathy is not that rare. In ERs and Cardiology Units patient cases are seen on a weekly basis. Doctors nowadays also know how to look for them.

In 2005 I was unnecessarily, during a small medical procedure, treated for too low blood pressure. Unnecessarily because the blood pressure measuring device was out of order. When this was discovered I had, due to fast hydration and blood elevating drugs, a blood pressure (BP) of 250/170! Soon after this my lungs filled with fluid and I felt like suffocating. A knowledgeable doctor in the ICU performed a heart ultrasound on me and diagnosed Takotsubo. I remember saying to the doctors that the root cause of Takotsubo in my case had to be the severe physiological stress caused by the unnecessary treatment of low (BP) that resulted in a hypertensive crisis. We had this discussion because at the time Takotsubo was linked to severe emotional stress. (Of course after the BP crisis I was also emotionally stressed!)

Today, 25 years after the first case report from Japan, we know that in only one third of the patients the attack can be linked to an emotional stressor such as grief, a panic attack or a big quarrel. In another third of patients Takotsubo is triggered by extreme physical strain, a medical procedure like an operation or treatment in an intensive care unit. In one third of patients no underlying cause can be found. A recent large international study (reference at the end of this article) on stress cardiomyopathy reports that Takotsubo is more common in patients with an underlying neurologic or psychiatric disease.

The current train of thought based on a lot of medical research on the underlying etiology of Takotsubo is that it is triggered by abnormal activity of the sympathetic part of the autonomous nervous system. Also the autonomic and central nervous system are in constant interaction. So the functions of the heart, the blood circulation, bodily reactions to emotions and mental states are all intertwined together and several different neuro-hormonal pathways are in play in a complex way. Luckily in most cases (I’m one of the lucky), patients recover fully from the acute temporary loss of cardiac (most probably) neural based dysfunction.

The first stress cardiomyopathy cases I happened to learn about from my medical colleagues were men. The middle-aged man at his daughter’s wedding and an older man (retired taxi-driver) who was involved in a three-car-collision accident. In this heated situation, in the middle of the traffic jam, a young man shouted at the older man accusing him of being a lousy old driver. The old man felt totally humiliated and wrongly accused and immediately experienced crushing pain in his chest due to Takotsuba. Currently cumulative patient data on stress cardiomyopathy, however, indicates that a “typical” Takotsubo –patient is a female in her later middle-age. So the possible beneficial effect of estrogen for preventing stress cardiomyopathy is currently being studied.

We may not yet have the whole picture of Takotsubo. In my opinion, milder cases of Takotsubo-like cardiac distress triggered by harmful stress, may not seek medical attention at ERs. They recover spontaneously after experiencing some chest discomfort and shortness of breath. Another interesting and important medical question has to do with the role of harmful stress in the development of progressing cardiomyopathy, a medical condition in which the heart muscle gradually degenerates loosing its pumping power. The development of cardiomyopathy is also seen in extreme sports. Stress during physical activity can also result in abnormal activity of the sympathetic nervous system. Every now and then we read about professional athletes experiencing heart arrhythmias.

Matters of the heart matter in all areas of human life. Some time ago, during a tram ride in Helsinki, I heard two, about ten-year old, girls talking. “The brain is the most important organ in our body”, one of the girls said. “You cannot do without the heart”, said the other. For human health the heart-brain axis is in the core of many things. How to be heart smart? You need to use your brain and listen to your heart.

This is my personal blog with my personal opinions. I am starting a new series Have a Byte of Health. In this series I will cover a range of different health related topics. My aim is to write summaries on interesting medical research that has caught my eye. I hope to translate medical jargon to something more understandable. One path to this is linking research findings to everyday life examples and experiences. I will also write about what science has figured ­– or thinks it has figured out – about humans.

The ongoing research journey into human health and being a human being is a winding road. Along the road one constantly finds bits of data pieces. How do they fit into the – often puzzling – Human Health puzzle. Findings both inspire us and challenge our understanding. And how to sort facts from fiction? Is the picture gaining clarity or becoming foggier, even to some extent distorted? And what is science fiction? I hope my writings tickle the mind and pick brains.

My first blog in this series is about matters of the heart. I hope you enjoy the read!

The popular quote “Men are from Mars and Women from Venus” went viral after the book with this title was published in 1992, by relationship council Gray. The author has an un-authorized PhD and his had taken a correspondence course in psychology before writing the book. Lucrative business in entertainment, training classes and streams of books on the Mars-Venus facts of life present. Survival hints even include “his-hers” salad dressings.

I have witnessed differences in opinions and viewpoints being dismissed with the Mars-Venus quote – and laugh. There are ongoing battles on leadership: men or women. If not on “can women be successful leaders, at least debating goes on gender differences in leadership. Do they exist or not? Does a woman need to be a man to lead? And, of course, do women understand technical stuff? What kind of a man becomes a nurse? It’s all about biology. Men and women are different, just look around. See for yourself! You cannot can’t ignore biology.

The brain is an important bio-physiological platform for our mental and cognitive processes. Does current research support the Mars-Venus claim? To what extent do female and male brains function in different ways? What about behaviour, mental and cognitive skills? How big are the differences between genders? Looking for answers, I went through some recent research in behavioral and neuroscience. Here are some findings I shared in my campus talk.

Though I titled my talk “The X-Factor in Mind”, it wasn’t actually about chromosomes or genes though they cannot be ignored in human development. However, in terms of human behavior and different types of skills, the role of genes as such is not all that great. Several groundbreaking advances in cognitive neurosciences and behavioral research tell us this.

The dawn of modern cognitive neuroscience – two inventive nobelists

The dawn of modern cognitive neuroscience was around the 1880’s. Two pioneer scientists of that time shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1906: Camillo Golgi invented the (still a classic) silver staining technique. It dramatically changed the view of brain slices under the light microscope making visible networks of neural cells, neurons. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a pathologist and passionate microscope developer, further improved the staining method and did ground-breaking work in describing structures of the nervous system.

What we so far have learned of the brain is a fantastic example of combining together basic and applied multidisciplinary research and technological sciences. Through advances in electrophysiology, brain imaging, computer and data sciences we now know that the brain contains a dense meshwork of neurons and crisscrossing pathways of neuronal fibres that link together different brain areas in many different ways. Cognitive neuroscience studies brain functions during task performance: Activity maps visualize how activity levels sequentially change in different brain areas when a person is performing a mental task during brain scanning. These flow waves of activity can differ between individuals implying that people, both women and men use different strategies when performing a certain task.

Are female brains wired differently than male brains?

I dug into recent neuro- and behavioural science to learn about gender differences in brain wirings. A study of brain images from nearly 950 youths, 521 females, aged 8-22 years (Ingalhalikar et al. 2014) suggests that male brain neural wiring is optimized for within brain hemisphere connections. This wiring links together perception and coordinated motor reaction – seeing and reacting. At group level, the neural wiring in female brains has more connectivity between left and right brain hemispheres. This is interpreted to facilitate linking together analytical and intuitive modes of cognition. So, are men more in the seeing and reacting mode and women in the “what does this mean” mode? It is too early for generalizations. Experience, as well as accumulating research has shown that when humans are concerned things are not straightforward. Anyway, we need both styles of behaviour in everyday life and work. They complement each other nicely.

Brain activation while tackling tasks requiring creative thinking (Abraham et al. 2014) was studied in a small group (14 females and 14 males) of around 20-year-old native German speaking science undergraduates. Again, we lefties (I belong to this minority) were left out as lefties tend to mix results. In women, higher activity was observed in brain structures related to speech processing, interpretation of social cues and understanding intentions of self and others. The activated brain areas in men related to forming concepts and rules, remembering facts and events. What might this mean in practise other than that cognitive strategies differ? Is it so that men more often are prone to mentally drawing charts and taking into account earlier learnings, while women stay at a more abstract level and seek answers to questions like how will this solution “play with others”. The study does not even try to answer the wicked question: “what is creativity?” Tests of creative problem solving often involve hidden rules and need out-of-the-box thinking. Thus, their usefulness in measuring e.g. creativity that produces cool inventions is limited.

Brainy and emotional

Neural activity maps of the brain do not directly tell us of a person’s cognitive skills or behaviour. Brain plasticity refers to the brain’s enormous capacity to mold its structure, as well as functions, to meet life’s demands. We have the ability to learn and modify our behavior. In the end, it is all about survival and the ability to live in varying social settings, in the midst of other people. Give and receive help. Thus, feedback from the environment in which we live makes a difference. Each day of our life we learn something and do updating of e.g. memories of experiences.

So, next I looked into psychology and behavioural research. An extensive review (Hyde) on research addressing gender similarities and differences in cognitive skills and behaviour was published in 2014: Women have a minor advantage in verbal and men in spatial 3D skills. Gender differences in mathematic abilities have disappeared, but women underestimate their math skills more than men. An interesting finding on communication is that women talk more in the tentative mode “could we…”, I suggest ….” than men. This is often (wrongly) interpreted as ambivalence – “she doesn’t know what she thinks, wants to do”. On the other hand, a woman with a more direct communication style is seen a bossy. Sociocultural factors play a role here.

What about emotions? Are women more emotional than men? Research does not support a yes answer to this question. Differences in experiencing emotions are trivial between genders. The palettes of emotions of both men and women have a wide range of colours that are influenced more by temperament, not gender. However, with increasing age the man – woman positivity gap becomes wider; men having a more positive attitude to life. This is something to think about.

I’m not an expert in leadership research, but this is what I learned from my dive into “The X-factor in Mind” related research: Both men and women have abilities on which to build to become respected and inspiring leaders. Style wise (research claims) there is an overall gender difference to tackling future problems: Men work more in the “wait and see mode” letting problems crop up before addressing them. Women tend to strive to identify possible problems beforehand in order to be prepared if they do surface. Again, in my opinion, both approaches are needed.

The Things-People issue

Then we have the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) gender gap. Research suggests that at school age also girls with good STEM skills are interested in studies and work in tech areas. But, especially girls with both good STEM and verbal skills tend to, in the end, choose to pursue a career in other areas such as medicine, either as doctors, nurses or e.g. hospital physicists. Different fields of medicine are nowadays technology-intensive and the rising trend continues. In addition to being tech savvy, health care professionals need people skills.

The biggest gender gap has been observed in interests – the Things-People -issue. To simplify: Men are more things people, women people people. The fact that human touch is important in several areas of technology and that technology-based solutions are for people should make STEM professions attractive also for girls and women. It seems that a lot of branding is needed to raise awareness of this.

Group level gender differences in brain wirings, behavioural styles and cognitive skills are subtle. Connected social human minds create the cultures in which we live. Cultural expectations mould the minds of humans. Different things are expected from men and women. These expectations, as well as other life event experiences are stored into the long-term memories of human brains. Women and men have shared, as well as different realities that play, often a significant role, in career choices.

“Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas”, is a quote linked to the two-time nobelist Marie Curie. In order to develop meaningful and useful technology based solutions that help people in their daily life, the interests and skills of both men and women are needed. We need people interested in things, ideas, people. Things and People -people working together can really make a difference.

Last week I finished a tough but rewarding job: From the many great research proposals submitted to the Skolar Award science contest, I finally picked my ten semi-finalist candidates. The decision wasn’t easy. All proposals that had made it through the first evaluation stage address challenging and important research questions. They cover, among others, a wide range of societal, environmental, cultural, medical and technological topics. The proposals are combinations of innovative ideas, novel methods and new approaches for seeking answers to demanding research questions. Many also make suggestions on how to apply the science based knowledge into practise. Between the written lines I sensed a passion for science, enthusiasm, inspiration, joy of exploring the unknown and hope to get funding to dive into uncharted science waters.

The pep talks and pitching

While I was reading through the proposals I took mental time leaps back to the 1980’s when I was a bright-eyed PhD student and taking my first steps in the world of science. Now, some 35 years later, I know the journey has its ups and downs. After some smooth sailing one encounters rougher waters. With persistence and also some luck, one survived the bumpier times, took a deep breath or a few and pushed on, full of hope. I especially remember the evening pep talks with my PhD student buddies in the lab’s coffee room. Each of us in turn heard the important words: Don’t give up. Now you know what not to do and can figure out what to do next. I also remember the popping sound of a champagne bottle being opened when finally, after several referee rounds, a research paper was accepted for publication. I also remember the hunting of impact factors and quotation rates.

In my mind a researcher believing in her/his research topic and pitching it to those deciding if one’s idea is worth funding, is not all that different from a start-up starter pitching to business angels. Thus it is highly appropriate that the Skolar Award science finalists will be pitching at the Helsinki Slush Event on December 1st. I am proud to be one of the judges also at the finals. I hope some business angles will be inspired to act as research angles and open their purse strings to support science which, when successful, can make a huge difference. Just think about nuclear magnetic resonance and all its applications from medical imaging to quantum computing.

A science journey surprises

Just like business start-ups starters believe in their product concepts, researchers tackling wicked questions have to have faith in their work while sailing on uncharted science waters and without a clear road map. This is called scientific exploration which needs protection in our impatient world. Research without risks is playing it safe. True, the original idea or plan might fail. One should, however, understand that during a science journey something unexpected and extraordinary may see light. Something that was not anticipated at the beginning of the research. This ability to seize the moment, change the course and goals of one’s research when this unique opportunity arises, is the ingredient that bakes great, often ground–breaking science. More often than not this baking powder remains a secret to too many, especially funding deciders, hungry for fast wins and predictable results. One would think that those funding research would be overjoyed by courageous scientists that seize the unexpected opportunities. Nowadays, unfortunately, this is not the case. Stick to your plan, don’ t wander.

Science is losing its appeal

I was fascinated by many of the Skolar Award proposals and feeling, for a change, hopeful of the future of science: There are brilliant courageous younger generation scientists who still want to work in research. At the same time alarming research news also caught my eye: Nature science journal just published an article “Hard work, little reward”. It reports the results of an online poll with disturbing results. Of the thousands of scientists participating in the survey nearly 65 % answered that they had thought of quitting and 15 % actually had. Why? If getting a PhD can be hard work, wait until you are a postdoc and start to build your own research group. At that point of your career when you start to know what science is about and have obtained the skills to start your own research group you fast notice that your time to actually do research shrinks to near nothingness. One’s time is spent in seeking funding, tackling growing bureaucracy, endless writing of research plans and reporting.

I speak from personal experience. It is a never ending circle one rides and never seems to reach a place where one gets the opportunity to concentrate on the important – science. No wonder researchers jump off this carousel after obtaining their PhD. They have seen, first-hand, how their seniors and group leaders are in the clutches of the ever growing research bureaucracy. And let’s not forget worrying about money. Even the most passionate researcher needs bread and butter.

Publish or perish – Dancing around what is already known

Publish or perish. This merciless truth was one of the first facts of a researcher’s reality senior researchers told me when I started my thesis work in the 1980’s. In the official funding criteria emphasis in the evaluation of grant proposals is claimed to be on novelty, risk taking and multidisciplinary research that addresses “wicked questions”. At the end of the day, it’s the length of the publication list that counts, stated researchers that answered Nature’s recent poll. So why enter uncharted waters? Everyone knows that it’s much easier to get a research paper through the reviewing system when you are not trying to pitch a ground breaking new finding. The best way to lengthen your publication list is to confirm what others have already published and use your creativity to find a somewhat different angle in your paper: To re-report something already published. Dance around what is already known. In Nature’s poll many researches felt that they have published papers just for the sake of “publish or perish”.

If you really want to get into trouble, start developing a new research technology. This is an effective way to say good bye to a steady growth of your publication list. If you want to get stuck in the reviewer process, do a research project that crosses the boundaries of traditional science fields. You will bump into referees that claim you cannot know anything about the field as you have “only two papers published so far in a particular field”. This response to a grant proposal and fait awaited a colleague of mine a couple of years ago: “The researcher is clearly competent with also an impressive publication record in certain fields of natural sciences. However, the researcher has not yet shown adequate enough competence in this new field. So even though the research proposal is of high quality, the risk of granting funding is too high based on the applicant’s current track record!”. My mental flashback to this response still manages to irritate me. And at the same time researchers are encouraged to widen the scope of their research!

Senseless documents – time and energy gobblers

Discussions on the everyday reality of scientists triggers memories of my earlier life events. A certain time period pops up, nearly daily, into my mind’s eye. It covers about two months of my life in 2014. I had decided to move to a shared working space and paperless office. It was time to give up my own office. Time to sort through my stuff.

Thinking back, this time period of office cleaning was an eye opener in many ways. I have strong emotional memory imprints stored in my brain of the ambivalent feelings I experienced while going through a huge amount of different types of documents. They covered over twenty years of my job as the head of various research units, centres and the leader of several large scale research programmes.

I don’t have to struggle to remember details or what I was thinking during that time. Memories that mark a tipping point in one’s life have this kind of power.

What did I find digging through the rows of thick binders of documents? A mind-blowing testimonial of countless documentation deeds. Their amount had through the years constantly increased. There were one-year, three- and five-year research strategy papers, over and over updated. Main work activities and goals had been squeezed into numerous, form-changing tables. Through the years, different project process models had been filled and refilled with doings.

For faceless decision makers I had written numerous vision papers on this and that, risk analysis reports on this and that, resourcing and re-resourcing plans. There were papers on constantly changing key targets, focus areas, short and long term goals. I found rewritings of yearly plans as document formats had of course changed. I had written numerous plans on competencies. I had tried to explain that there is a limit to a person’s ability to be a chameleon. Even if life-long learning and learning through work is in the core of all work, a research engineer cannot turn into a psychologist or a psychologist into a research engineer just like that, with the snap of fingers.

My time and energy had increasingly been gobbled up with stuff that had, if anything, been a hindrance to research. I also found writings in which I had tried to put a stop to this constant reporting and documentation. In vain. In one case (I remember very well) I had refused to split people into percentages and link one half or one third of a person into different labs and working spaces. I replied to this re-request that I had already performed this operation less than one year ago without getting any feedback on said report. The faceless answer from somewhere from someone was: just do it. It’s all about justifying resourcing, explaining needs. To survive document, report. Well in that particular case I had taken the earlier report and just changed the date. Nobody got back to me on this resourcing paper.

I claim that, also in science, the exponentially growing, never-ending reporting is one of the biggest causes of frustration; a sure killer of mental productivity effectively sucking out motivation. And the bitter lemons that add the final souring touch to all doings are the faceless time management tools. Everyone knows that clocking and dividing time into different slots doesn’t give any valuable information on what is actually going on in work, in this case research.

Writing and re-writing plans and spending countless hours in research strategy planning has become more important than science itself. When the research plans have finally gained funding and to top it all have then been approved by some chief in the organization where the work is supposed to take place, the research can be “old news”.

What brings the spark to go on?

So what keeps the more senior researchers in science in these troubled times? Energy to go on comes from the following moments: One has managed to engage in an actual scientific discussion with one’s team members or peers. One has found time to actually supervise PhD students or participate in content planning of research. One is getting food for thought through discussing and networking at conferences with other researchers. One is rejoicing together with co-authors when finally, the words “accepted for publication” appear on the computer screen. One has managed to read through with thought a great scientific paper. Often the time to be inspired is “out of office time” away from personal life time. This time tackling dilemma was a concern of many researchers answering the Nature poll. Believe it or not, also scientists want and have a private life.

For years my emotions have ranged from despair to WAU, what a fantastic job I have. The reporting tsunami grew year by year. In step with this overwhelming tide I often had a nagging guilty feeling. Its cause was often that I didn’t have enough time to educate younger scientists. Too often I had to make the tough choice between whether to use my (limited) time and creative energy for preparing (again) a research funding application or for in depth discussions on science around a research manuscript. If the next pay check of one’s PhD student hangs in the air, which way to spend your time would you choose? But trying to give some financial stability to your researchers is not enough.

Hope for hope in science

If we truly believe that 1) new ideas, innovative solutions, outside the box thinking, courage to try out “crazy stuff” pave the way to something new, perhaps even the currently un-imaginable and that 2) persistence and commitment to make an idea work are important ingredients of success in all areas of work, also science, we have to believe in people. We mustn’t overburden them with senseless reporting. Management, please, don’t micromanage. Leave people in piece. Let them do their job. You’ll be surprised at what brilliant stuff starts to see light. I hope the Skolar Awards event also paves the way to a new wave of science supporting and brings into the spot light the importance of independent science.

The outcome of my office cleaning was 2400 litres of paper shoved into the shredder. What was my learning? Never again will I waste my time on senseless re-reporting. I am older and tougher now. To younger scientists I give also a different hope: If the tide in science doesn’t change. If NO to senseless reporting just isn’t an option. If the working conditions of scientist are not taken seriously and improved remembers: The education and skills you have obtained as a PhD student and researcher are valuable also outside academia, in other fields of working life. Also here I speak from personal experience.